Andrew

radical backwater appalachia hermit. ένας φιλέλληνας. ☭ he/him

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

If you keep telling people that they need to choose between supporting Jews and opposing the mass slaughter of children, then it is actually you who are responsible for spreading antisemitism.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I judge Jewish people's character based on whether or not they oppose the genocidal apartheid state of Israel.

This is also how I judge the character of people who are not Jewish.

Ever since the UK Green party's "Zionism is racism" motion we've been seeing this narrative circulating that Jews are somehow exempt from the basic human duty to oppose genocide and apartheid, just because support for Israel happens to be common among the Jewish community.

The British political/media class has been frenetically attacking the Greens' objectively correct position as antisemitic, putting out statement after statement proclaiming that it is wrong to ask Jews to oppose a nakedly racist and destructive political ideology.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, quoted in the Financial Times, accuses the Greens of imposing an “extremist purity test” on Jews.

The Movement for Progressive Judaism, quoted in The Guardian, asserts that "Jewish self-determination is a right. Declaring it racist is an attack on Jews. The Green party has chosen to brand Jews who hold this belief as racists and make their equal participation in the party conditional on renouncing it."

"British Jews should not have to disclaim a belief in Jewish self-determination and the existence of Israel in order to be accepted by a British political party," said shadow home secretary Chris Philp in a quote published by the BBC.

"Asking Jews to pass a purity test and renounce self-determination according to a perverse interpretation arbitrarily applied, isn't just an extreme position, it’s a racist one," adds Baroness Luciana Berger.

I am absolutely fascinated by this notion that Jews are some kind of magical faerie elf creature to whom the normal standards of human decency simply do not apply. If you happen to belong to this one particular religion, then it somehow becomes an abusive "purity test" to expect that you should oppose a fundamentally racist state premised on endless apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

It doesn't work that way. We are all morally obligated to oppose genocide and apartheid no matter what our religion happens to be. You have a moral responsibility to reject racist political ideologies. If you don't, then you are a racist. There are no special exceptions.

It is true that the majority of Jews support Israel. The argument that majority support makes it a valid position is a fallacy called argumentum ad populum; a position being popular among a given group says nothing about how correct it is. All manner of horrors were once supported by the majority of the public. At one time it was widely believed that it was perfectly legitimate to own a human being if their ancestors happened to be from Africa, but with greater moral clarity we all now recognize that that was wrong.

Zionism is no different; it's a political ideology whose material manifestations have never at any time failed to include racist policies and ethnic cleansing. If you believe Jews have a right to return after being absent from the land for millennia but don't believe Palestinians have a right of return after decades in exile, then you are obviously a racist. If you support an ideology which dropped a brand-new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing ethnic group who suddenly became subjected to ethnic cleansing and apartheid, then you are of course a racist. Your religion of choice does not magically exempt you from this.

EVERYONE should be asked to pass the “purity test” of renouncing a genocidal apartheid state. Jews are no exception to this self-evident moral reality.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Nobody gives a fuck about October 7.

No one cares. They used to, but then Israel spent three years showing the world why October 7 happened in the first place. After witnessing the cruelty and savagery of the state of Israel, people get it now. Everyone understands.

After Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on the morning of October 7, there was an outpouring of love and sympathy for Israel from around the entire world. Every major landmark from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House to the Empire State Building were illuminated blue and white in solidarity with the Israeli people. Grown men wept. Bono permanently ruined "Pride (In The Name of Love)" by changing the lyrics to "Early morning, October 7, as the sun is rising in the desert sky, Stars of David, they took your life, but they could not take your priiiiide."

Anyone who hadn't been following the Israel-Palestine issue very closely was on Israel's side that day. And then the bombs started dropping.

And dropping.

And dropping.

And dropping.

And as the bombs dropped, Israel's approval rating dropped with them.

There are only so many children you can see shredded to bits by Israeli military explosives before you start suspecting that there's something terribly wrong with the Zionist project.

There are only so many pictures and videos you can see posted by IDF troops dressed in the underwear of dead and displaced Palestinian women before you start wondering if there's something terribly wrong with the culture of the Israeli military.

There are only so many Israeli polls you can see published showing overwhelming support for the Gaza onslaught before you start believing there is something terribly wrong with Israeli society itself.

There are only so many mainstream humanitarian institutions who can determine that Israel is guilty of genocide before you start recognizing exactly what it is that you are looking at.

There are only so many bombed-out hospitals, so many miles of completely flattened neighborhoods, so many grizzly accounts of Palestinian prisoners being savagely raped and tortured by Israeli soldiers you can see before all the excuses, justifications and spin stop working on you.

And once the hasbara stops working, it's just you and the unadorned reality of the situation, staring each other right in the eyes.

The propagandists and spinmeisters have been falling all over themselves trying to frame the world's plummeting support for Israel as an epidemic of "antisemitism", but that's not working anymore either. Everyone knows it's a lie. Nobody's buying it. It just feels like they're insulting your intelligence.

The Gaza holocaust was the single worst thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Day after day, month after month, year after bloody year staring right down the barrel of that waking nightmare changed me forever, and there is nothing in me that will ever forget the horrors I witnessed. And the world is full of people who had the exact same experience I had.

Support for Israel is never coming back. When the lights flicker on and you see that the room you've been standing in is full of scorpions, you're not going to forget what you saw when the lights go out again.

All of the events which occurred after October 7 showed the world what life was like for Palestinians before October 7. Israel threw a stone into the air and spent three years crying after the stone came down on its head.

The hasbarists have been flailing all over the place trying to erase everything that happened before October 7 and to justify everything that has happened since, but their words are just words now. They have no power anymore. And now it's just a matter of time before the world turns against Israel to right the wrongs of the past and set everything back the way it ought to be. From the river to the sea.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Fascinated by this idea that Jews are magical faerie elf creatures who are somehow exempt from the basic human duty to oppose genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Genocidal apartheid ethnostates should not exist and it is racist to believe they should.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The UK Greens have adopted a motion asserting that Zionism is racism, which of course means Israel apologists are churning out hasbara arguing that Zionism is actually a perfectly lovely and normal thing that we should all support.

"Zionism is just the belief that Jews deserve a homeland and self-determination," they'll claim, often adding a suggestion that the real racists are those who would oppose such a reasonable position.

The problem with these arguments is that they have already been soundly refuted by objective reality. You don't get to just make up your own pleasant-sounding definition of Zionism when there has been a Zionist state showing us in stark terms exactly what Zionism is for eight decades. Zionism means nonstop apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war, genocide, and abuse. That is what Zionism is. The evidence is in. This is a settled matter.

There is no way to implement Zionism without implementing fundamentally racist policies. As Richard Sanders put it, "If you can work out a way to create an ethnically defined political entity in a territory that, at the start of the process, was almost entirely populated by people of a different ethnicity, without resorting to ethnic cleansing and Apartheid, then you need to tell the Israelis. Because they’ve certainly never worked it out."

The Palestinian author Mohammed El-Kurd summed it up eloquently with the following anecdote:

"At a recent closed-door meeting in London to discuss BDS with various publishers and writers, a well-intentioned, well-known author asked me if Zionism could hold a double meaning: To some, it is a settler-colonial movement motivated by expansion and racial elimination, and to others it is a movement for Jewish self-determination. 'No,' I said. 'Zionism is best defined by its material manifestations—the most recent being genocide. It is irrelevant whether it could contain multitudes.' "

In other words, Zionism is what it does. And what it does is visible to the entire world.

There is no argument to be made that Zionism doesn't necessarily entail racism, apartheid and abuse; if it did, the modern state of Israel would have existed without these things at some point.

If you think racism, apartheid and abuse are bad, then you necessarily oppose Zionism. If you support Zionism, then you necessarily support racism, apartheid and abuse. If you tell me you can have Zionism without racism, apartheid and abuse, then you are simply lying to me. And maybe to yourself as well.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Everyone who opposed Israel’s creation has been proven correct by the subsequent course of history. It’s a failed experiment. It turns out giving the Zionists everything they want results in nonstop war, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and abuse. This has been thoroughly established.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

More and more humans are suffering from empire psychosis.

People who can’t go ten minutes without checking their phones, losing hours a day to social media and mindless scrolling.

People talking to chatbots, learning about the world from them, learning about life from them, making friends with them, forming relationships with them.

Binging on podcasts, binging on streaming services, binging on video games, binging on apps, binging on vapes, binging on treats delivered to their door by underpaid workers from bombed-out countries.

The bread was designed in a lab to be furiously addictive, and the circuses track your preferences to serve you up all your favorite performances.

Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins.

It’s a frenzied discontentedness. A persistent delusion that satisfaction exists right around the corner after the next restless squirm. It's an artificially manufactured mental disorder. And it’s worth trillions of dollars.

In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us.

We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are. That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more.

They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us. They deceive us into leaving our home and then charge us an admission price to come visit.

Something went wrong. Humanity went off course. They enclosed the commons, colonized the new world, constructed a tiered society of haves and have-nots, and now we’re all living like space aliens on our own home planet.

We do not have to keep suffering from their man-made madness. We can do the inner work necessary to come back to our own contentedness, and we can do the outer work necessary to take back what the manipulators have stolen from us.

We don’t need to keep consenting to this abusive relationship any longer. A healthy world is our birthright. We will tear down the madness machine and stand at peace in the soil of the planet we were born on.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

See this is what I'm talking about. We're told there's an epidemic of "antisemitism" in our society and Zionists are always claiming hate crimes happened to them, but whenever there's actual footage it's always stuff like "man said Free Palestine to notorious genocide apologist."

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Tech plutocrats are the high-budget expression of the “everyone is twelve now” theory. You wanna go to Mars? Of course you do, you’re twelve. You think you can merge your consciousness with machinery and unlock the key to immortality? Hell yeah my twelve year-old homie. You’re gonna invent an Artificial Superintelligence God who will solve all our problems? Bless your twelve year-old heart.

Their visions for the future of humanity are never particularly wise or intelligent. It’s just a bunch of drugged-up rich guys using their vast fortunes to chart a course for our species that would sound totally awesome to the average preadolescent boy.

You ever hear Jeff Bezos’ vision for our future? He brings it up once in a while. He wants to ship most of humanity offworld and have us all living in these giant spinning space tubes called O’Neill cylinders while only a few lucky individuals get to remain on humanity’s home planet. It’s true, look it up.

This is the best these freaks can come up with. Transhumanism. Space colonization. Virtual reality. ASI. Immortality. These are all visions which revolve around escape. Escaping from the human condition. Escaping from our planet. Escaping from reality. Running, running, running away in a mad scramble to get anywhere but here.

These aren’t positive visions for the future, they’re signs of deep psychological immaturity. They’re the symptoms of an inability to be with what is. Whenever you hear these guys bloviating about transcending our humanity or colonizing space they’re just telling you they’ve got a lot of unresolved early childhood trauma which led them to construct an entire personality around avoidance and restlessness.

They don’t know how to be at peace. Not with themselves, and not with the world. These are very emotionally primitive individuals. They are not wise. They are not kind. They are not happy. They are not even particularly smart. They just have a particular kind of cleverness which has enabled them to succeed as parasitic middle men siphoning wealth off of other people’s labor in the specific type of dystopia we happen to live in.

And yet these are the men we’re allowing to rule our world. These are the people to whom we have handed the steering wheel of human destiny. A bunch of emotionally stunted manchilds who are drowning in a nonstop internal deluge of shame and inadequacy and unresolved mommy issues.

These are the men who have become our kings, because capitalism elevates whoever is wounded enough to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top.

You trust these guys to shepherd us into a healthy world? They can't even be here now, at peace in their own skins.

This isn’t going to cut it. We can’t led these infantile narcissists lead humanity into the future. We’ve got to create a better system for ourselves.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Being aggressively pro-Palestine is the most efficient way to weed all the worst people out of your life.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Jewish Zionists are always going "I was hate crimed, someone screamed Heil Hitler at my synagogue" but whenever they post actual video footage of an "antisemitic incident" it's always like some angry Israeli filming a Burger King employee telling them Free Palestine.

[Aaron Maté @aaronjmate]

The slogan is the solution - Free Palestine

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

It's open season on any socialist government in the western hemisphere from here on out. The old days of subtle subversion and covert ops are over; now the US knows it can just openly kidnap any disobedient leader in Latin America and force it back into the capitalist order.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Under capitalism it's legal for employers to steal from their employees.

Doordash has reached a historic $131.5 million settlement to repay workers in New York City for wages the food delivery app stole from them over the last four years, which sounds like a big win for the little guy if you don’t think about it too hard.

The Hill reports:

“Under the settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and city officials announced on Tuesday, DoorDash will pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late. The food delivery company will also pay more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs.”

So all Doordash has to do is return the money it stole and pay a microscopic fraction of its $13.7 billion yearly revenue in penalties, and that’s it. Nobody’s going to prison. Nobody was threatened with jail time. It wasn’t even a criminal case; it was an administrative enforcement action by New York City regulators. Doordash’s billionaire CEO Tony Xu is as free as a bird.

A hundred and fifteen million dollars.

What do you think would happen to you if you stole $115 million from your employer?

Can you imagine that not being treated as a crime? Can you imagine going “Haha, ya got me! I’ll return the cash. Can’t blame a guy for trying!” and then paying a small fine and just going back to your life like it was no big deal?

Of course you can’t. You know you’d be arrested, handcuffed, prosecuted for grand larceny, and then spend many years behind bars.

Under capitalism it is strictly illegal for employees to steal from their employers, but if employers steal from their employees it’s not even a crime. It’s not even a petty misdemeanor. It’s perfectly legal.

Which is so obnoxious, because stealing from workers is obviously much more abusive and destructive than stealing from billionaire corporations. The wealthy executives of a gig economy app would not have their lives affected in the slightest by an employee stealing from their company, but workers who are struggling to pay their bills can be devastated by even a few missing dollars in their paycheck.

Employers stealing from employees is also plainly worse than the reverse because when an employer steals from an employee, they’re not just stealing their money. They’re stealing their labor. They’re stealing their time, which is the one thing you can’t make more of in this life. They’re stealing slices of your lifespan which you would otherwise be spending with loved ones and doing things that fulfill you. They’re actually stealing your life.

And yet it’s only illegal for employees to steal from their employers. Employers stealing from employees? That’s just business.

This glaring disparity between the rights of employers and employees exists because capitalism is all about using state power to protect the interests of capital. The most ardent proponents of our present system like to contrast capitalism with communism by claiming that communism can only be enforced through abusive excesses of state power, as though we don’t see state power dropping the hammer on the working class every minute of every day throughout our society. In practice the most significant difference between a socialist state and a capitalist one is whose interests state power is used to protect.

We live in a tiered society where the people actually turning the wheels of civilization through their sweat and toil are legally inferior to the parasitic middle men who skim the profits from their labor. This is not justice, and this is not equality, as hard as the propagandists of the capitalist empire might try to indoctrinate us into believing the contrary.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

We're seeing more Israel apologia than ever despite Israel having an all-time low public approval rating, so this is an obvious propaganda blitz which is clearly tied to Israel multiplying its propaganda budget and Zionist oligarchs ramping up their narrative control campaign.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I strongly disagree that it's unhelpful to bully celebrities about their position on Palestine. On the contrary, I think we should bully them more.

We tend to underestimate the consequences of the fact that all the most amplified voices in our society are millionaires. Under capitalism the people with the largest platforms and the biggest audiences are all wealthy enough to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo, so they're reluctant to rock the boat politically in any major way.

When all the most influential voices in our society are creating the illusion that the system is more or less fine the way it is by what they say and what they don't say, it cannot help but significantly influence public political opinion. In this way celebrities function as a kind of goalkeeper preventing dissident thought from reaching the minds of the masses.

When you see Ed Sheeran bawling his eyes out onstage and playing victim because people are criticizing his muteness on the moral issue of our time, he genuinely does feel as though something is being taken away from him. He was enjoying being able to relax in the lap of luxury without having to go against the grain of establishment power in any way, never saying anything which upsets the Zionist billionaires or the media-owning class whose infrastructure he built his lucrative career on. Now that comfortable setup has been taken away from him a bit, and he feels victimized by the inconvenience this has caused him.

This dynamic is what holds the entire construct of celebrity in place in our society. If you make the billionaires happy you get to be a millionaire, and if you make the billionaires unhappy you get discomfort and loss. If you please the plutocrats you get the carrot, and if you displease them you get the stick. This is true whether you're talking about pundits, news anchors, musicians or movie stars.

This system of carrots and sticks is the main adhesive holding the propaganda apparatus of the western empire together. As westerners we are taught that we live in a free society which is far superior to the "tyrannical regimes" of the global south, because under the tyrannical regimes the news is state propaganda and the entertainment is heavily censored. In reality westerners are consuming tightly controlled propaganda every day of their lives, because all their most influential voices are being aggressively regulated by the carrots and sticks of wealthy capitalists.

The only weakness in this system, apparently, is that it only works if the public plays along with it. If enough people decide to denounce and defund the empire's celebrity goalkeepers for their complicity in imperial abuses, it turns out that we've got a stick of our own. Make it too uncomfortable to toe the imperial line and you'll start seeing celebrities reluctantly follow the moral leadership of the public, thereby further weakening the vice-like grip of the imperial narrative control apparatus on our collective consciousness.

So we should do so happily and without hesitation. It is perfectly moral to ruin a millionaire's day for both-sidesing a genocide. It is perfectly ethical to bully people with large platforms until they take a public stand against the abuses of the empire which has made them obscenely wealthy. It won't solve all our problems, but it will weaken the power of the mass-brainwashing machine of the capitalist empire which has been manipulating the public into believing we don't urgently need revolutionary change.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

Why is Trump meeting with President Xi, after constantly demonizing China, waging a trade war, and scapegoating it?

Because Trump's trade war and tariffs backfired, and US corporations desperately want access to the massive Chinese market.

The White House invited the following US corporate executives to join the dinner with Trump and Xi in Washington:
Microsoft's Satya Nadella
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang
OpenAI’s Sam Altman
Google’s Sundar Pichai
Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk
Citigroup’s Jane Fraser
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos
Apple’s Tim Cook
Dell’s Michael Dell

These oligarchs are the US government's real constituents.

Source: https://t.co/99xEgnQDn3

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Helping the US to bomb Iran. Now, helping Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen.

This is a terrible and shameful decision, which drags Britain further into conflict, deepens its complicity in Saudi war crimes, and proves that no lessons have been learned whatsoever.